Tag Archives: political science

An article in the American Journal of Political Science was corrected after the coding of a political attitude variable was accidentally the wrong way around. Pre-publication cross-checks by the authors and the journal, as well as publication of the original data and variable transformations can avoid such problems.

Can we trust published articles in political science? A recent paper suggests that we should be sceptic. When comparing the published results of survey experiments with the pre-registered plans for the same study, a lot of information gets lost. 80 percent of the studies failed to report all experimental conditions and planned outcomes.

A group of 625 political scientists signed a petition to delay the new APSA guidelines for transparency. They want to discuss the implications for qualitative data, hand-written field notes and confidential data first. I agree that practical discussions are necessary – but this should not be a reason to abandon the transparency guidelines.Continue reading →

The American Journal of Political Science recently announced that every article will be externally verified before it is published. Authors have to provide all data, code and materials which will be verified by an external statistician. I talked to the editor William G. Jacoby about the goals of the new policy, and why no author has provided ‘perfect’ files yet.Continue reading →

Repost of an article by Christoper Gandrud: Reproducibility has come a long way in political science. Many major journals now require replication materials be made available either on their websites or some service such as the Dataverse Network. This is certainly progress. But what are political scientists actually supposed to do with this new information?